The Impact of Auditors' Cognitive Style on Fraud Risk Assessment: (A Test of Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory)

Cognitive styles are considered to be a constant feature in the organization and processing of information and comprise a set of orderly mental behaviors that deal with mental maps and problem-solving. The purpose of this article is to study the effect of Kolb's Cognitive Styles of auditors on fraud risk assessment. Kolb's cognitive styles include convergent, divergent, Assimilator, and Accommodator styles. The statistical sample of the research consisted of 539 auditors working in the auditing institutes of the Iranian Society of Certified Auditors and the audit organization located in the geographical area of Tehran in 2019 which were selected using simple random sampling. The research method is a descriptive survey and the instrument used in the research is the standard questionnaire. Structural equation modeling using Lisrel software was used to analyze the data and test the hypotheses. The research overall results show that there is a relationship between Kolb's Cognitive Styles of auditors and fraud risk assessment and respectively the Assimilator, divergent, Accommodator and convergent cognitive styles have the most influence on the fraud risk assessment.